New policy needed to boost rural economy

In July, while chairing a five-day discussion on China's reform, the 95-year-old Nobel laureate Ronald Coase asked Peking University professor Zhou Qiren to speak on how "Deng's drama unfolded" .

For an intellectual like him, Zhou replied, the first step in the late leader Deng Xiaoping's reform was to help people regain their chances of obtaining higher education. "This changed the fate of many people of my generation," said the famous economist. Zhou himself had been sent to a remote village in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to be "re-educated by farmers" at the age of 16. Only ten years later in 1977, he joined the first batch of college entrants after years of suspension of college enrollment in China due to "cultural revolution" (1966-76).

But Zhou had even been fascinated by the pioneering spirit of hungry farmers in Xiaogang village of Anhui province, whose starvation forced them to divide the collective land to every household in 1978.